The latest metrics for the Pc industry are in form research firm Gartner. Gartner shows that the global PC industry declined 6.9% in Q4 2013. That marks the worst decline in the history of the PC market. The upside for the PC industry is that industry analysts think we have reached the bottom.

Hitting bottom means that sales and shipments of PCs are expected to level out and hover around the current level. The top computer maker in the industry for Q4 2013 was Lenovo with 18.1% of the market. Lenovo was followed by HP with 16.4% of the PC market. Rounding out the top five were Dell, Acer, and Asus.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

Gartner's top chart looks a bit different when you consider the U.S. market alone. HP was the top company in the U.S. with 26.5% of the market followed by Dell with 22.8%. Apple was number three in the US at 13.7% of the market with Lenovo not showing up until fourth place with 9.7% of the U.S. market. Toshiba has the fifth place spot in the U.S. with 7.2% of the market.

The numbers for research firm IDC are similar, but show a less significant decline in the overall PC market – 5.6% -- for Q4 2013.

IDC lists Lenovo as the top firm in the global PC industry with 18.6% of the market followed by HP with 16.8%. The remainder of the top five include Dell, Acer, and Asus. In the U.S., the top firm is HP with 24.6% of the market followed by Dell with 21.7%, Lenovo with 9.8%, Apple with 9.3%, and Toshiba with 8.2%.

Oh, I'm not saying there aren't ways to crush modern computers now - I'm sure there are plenty of ways to bring down 24 cores of Xeon, let alone 12-8-6-4 cores.

But I'm not talking about editing multiple streams of uncompressed 4K video with live preview or processing thousands of 36MP RAW files. I'm not really talking about an expensive space sim or VR glasses that I wanna try.

There needs to be something that everyone wants that can't be done. Even the push to big data within corporations is actually pushing the need for power away from personal computers - for the past few years I've had a laptop that queries servers to pull data/run code, there's not much that's done locally that needs a lot of power.

Now that we have the basics covered ('good enough' gaming/productivity/media), what's next to push the frontier?

Forced obsolescence. Ever wonder why you can't buy stuff that lasts for decades anymore like you could years ago? Things are engineered to break.

I'm not saying Computer hardware is. In our case it is the software. Software updates are pushed out to make stuff run like crap to entice users to upgrade. I suspect there are many companies doing this already.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis